A man who had properly cultivated, what Tom Wolfe later called, “the Right Stuff.”īut you. That’s a man not simply sitting at the controls but in control of his emotions. John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, spent nearly a day in space still keeping his heart rate under a hundred beats per minute. Fortunately, unfamiliarity is simple to fix (again, not easy), which makes it possible to increase our tolerance for stress and uncertainty. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate, fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity. Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. They’d practice all the way through, holding nothing back but the liftoff itself, making sure to solve for every variable and remove all uncertainty. They did it so many times that it became as natural and familiar as breathing. Slowly, in a graded series of “exposures,” the astronauts were introduced to every sight and sound of the experience of their firing into space.
And it does not go easily.īefore the first launch, NASA re-created the fateful day for the astronauts over and over, step by step, hundreds of times-from what they’d have for breakfast to the ride to the airfield. Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm, because it’s easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face.Īt 150 miles above Earth in a spaceship smaller than a VW, this is death. Everything is planned down to the letter, then something goes wrong and the first thing we do is trade in our plan for a good ol’ emotional freak-out. Welcome to the source of most of our problems down here on Earth. They just react-not to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. When America raced to send the first men into space, they trained the astronauts one skill more than in any other: the art of not panicking. Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.
Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. The book will show both how you can use this idea to obstacles into opportunities and how this has been done throughout history, from John D. Ryan’s book draws on Marcus Aurelius’ idea that “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way”.
We’ll feature some more extracts in a couple of weeks (on May 10th and 17th). Ryan Holiday‘s new book, The Obstacle is the Wayis launched today, and you can read an excerpt from Ryan’s book below, which focusses on controlling your emotions, no matter how difficult the circumstances.
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